this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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I mean, it's still Open Source, right? So it would be pretty hard for them to hide a backdoor or something??
I guess I don't know what's so sus when it's easily auditable by the community and has been for two decades now.
If it's just because it's memes and you're not being that serious, then disregard please.
Right but maybe it combined with other tools they have is what helps them with some exploit.
Like they figured out an exploit but needed SELinux as a piece of the puzzle. It's open source
and we can all read the code but we can't see the other pieces of the puzzle.
Come on, put your conspiracy hat on! ;)
This is why I use templeOS
Dude, that one got a spy built-in! Direct telemetry to god.
That explains why it doesnβt need internet
Ok, conspiracy hat on...Maybe Snowden was the only NSA contributor with the sole purpose of making tracking citizens harder!
I mean, they almost certainly have built in backdoors like IME. When you can force hardware manufacturers to add shit, you don't have to think up convoluted solutions like that.
I maintain open source software on a much smaller codebase that is less security critical. We have dozens of maintainers on a project with about 3k stars on GitHub. Stuff gets by that are potentially security vulnerabilities and we donβt know until upstream sources tell us there is a vulnerability
I'd imagine in this case there has been extra community scrutiny since it's security software and it comes from less than trustworthy source.
It happens, though.
Though this implies that the Department of Defense doesn't want to use compromised tools, since DARPA is DoD. NSA is also DoD.
They wouldn't want to use or derive any compromised software themselves. They would want any adversaries to have it implemented.
People don't understand that the way a backdoor is usually implemented is not going to be obviously saying "backdoor_here", neither it will look like a some magic code loading a large string and unzipping it on the fly -- that's sus af. What you will see is some "play video" functionality that has a very subtle buffer overflow bug that's also not trivially triggerable.
This already happened with WhatsApp.
Honestly I think a lot of backdoors are just unintentionally exploits that are not disclosed
I did some follow-up research and found that subsequent audits found no backdoors. They're either incredibly sneaky, or the person making these claims wasn't being entirely honest.
Do you know of any good comprehensive followup to this? A quick search shows me lots of outdated info and inconclusive articles. Do you know if they conclusively found anything or if there is a good writeup on the whole situation?
I don't have such a source, but the Cybersecurity community throw accusations around easily, and are loathe to ever bless any software as completely innocent - which is a good thing.
When the accusations stop, the issue has either been addressed (typical outcome), or the product owner was written off by the Cybersecurity community as a lost cause (rare, but it happens).